# ONNX Runtime v1.28.1 — ONNX Runtime v1.28.1

- Product: ONNX Runtime (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/onnx-runtime)
- Vendor: Microsoft
- Date: 2026-08-18
- Version: v1.28.1
- Original notes: https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/releases/tag/v1.28.1
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/onnx-runtime/releases/v1.28.1

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

---

- **added** — Support for device-free compile-only sessions in WebGPU EP, enabling offline graph transformation and optimized-model serialization without access to GPU hardware
- **fixed** — Prevented an access violation in Windows processes under Win32k lockdown by skipping DXGI device discovery
- **fixed** — Allowed zero-input EPContext nodes, aligning their schema with support for compiling zero-input models
- **fixed** — Hardened FastGelu fusion to skip malformed Mul and Pow patterns
- **fixed** — Added validation for in-memory external initializer references, rejecting unregistered or mismatched data before graph transformation

This is a patch release on top of [v1.28.0](https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/releases/tag/v1.28.0), containing support for device-free WebGPU compilation, improved compatibility with sandboxed Windows processes, and targeted graph-validation fixes.

##### WebGPU EP

- Added support for device-free compile-only sessions, enabling offline graph transformation and optimized-model serialization without access to GPU hardware ([#29681](https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/pull/29681))

##### Bug Fixes

- Prevented an access violation in Windows processes under Win32k lockdown by skipping DXGI device discovery ([#29755](https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/pull/29755))
- Allowed zero-input `EPContext` nodes, aligning their schema with support for compiling zero-input models ([#29799](https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/pull/29799))
- Hardened FastGelu fusion to skip malformed `Mul` and `Pow` patterns ([#32016](https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/pull/32016))
- Added validation for in-memory external initializer references, rejecting unregistered or mismatched data before graph transformation ([#32042](https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/pull/32042))

##### Contributors

Thanks to our 4 contributors for this release!

[@apsonawane](https://github.com/apsonawane), [@shiyi9801](https://github.com/shiyi9801), [@adrastogi](https://github.com/adrastogi), [@mingmingtasd](https://github.com/mingmingtasd)

Full Changelog: [v1.28.0...v1.28.1](https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/compare/v1.28.0...v1.28.1)